Daisy's Secret (20 page)

They then had to go down to the police station and Mr Chapman had to fill in a great many forms, produce several documents to prove ownership of the car, and listen to a long lecture by the desk sergeant. By the time they finally did arrive home it was to find Mrs Chapman in a fine paddy, and neither one of them dared to complain about the fact that their dinner was cold.
 

It was half past nine by the time Daisy went next door and rattled Mrs Marshall’s letterbox. The door was opened by her husband.

‘Oh, hello Mr Marshall, I’m so sorry to disturb you but I just popped round to say that I’m sorry I wasn’t able to come and help tonight but I. . .’ Her explanation was stopped in mid-sentence as Mr Marshall cut in with the blunt words that his wife had been taken to hospital.

Daisy paled. ‘Oh no, she isn’t losing the baby, is she?’

‘They’re hopeful that the problem is nothing worse than simple exhaustion. There’s no bleeding this time, thank God, but she has some pains in her back so they’ve taken her in to keep her under observation overnight. I called the billeting officer and the children have been taken away.’

‘Taken away?’ Daisy was mortified.

‘I packed their things myself. My wife is far more important to me than two waifs from Salford.’

‘But . . .’ Lost for words she took a deep breath and started again. ‘Couldn’t you at least have waited till I got home, Mr Marshall?’

‘I’m sorry, Daisy, I know you’re fond of them but as you said yourself, you weren’t here and I didn’t know whether you were coming later or not. Had you been, I might well have spoken to you about it, though it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. Generous as you are with your time, you can’t be with them every minute, can you? You have your own work to do, after all. I’m not an unfeeling man but those two little live wires are more than Mabel can cope with right now, for all she’s done her best.’

‘Oh, I know she has. I do understand.’

The little one, Trish, screamed the house down when I tried to explain to her that if we didn’t send my dear wife away for a rest, the baby might die.’
 

‘Oh dear, she probably thought that it was all her fault,’ Daisy said. ‘She’s very sensitive about death, having already lost her gran, and Miss Pratt.’

‘I can’t help that. I must put my wife and my own child first. Megan thought at first I was saying there’d be no more room for them here, after the baby came, so she offered to sleep under the table. And when I said nobody will sleep under the table in my house, she said that it didn’t bother her because she was used to it. That’s where she’d slept at home when her mam had got a sailor in her bed. Really Daisy, I can’t have such children around, not with a young, vulnerable baby to care for.’

‘I’m not blaming you at all, Mr Marshall. It’s just that . . . Did the billeting officer say where he was taking them?’

Mr Marshall shook his head. ‘A woman came, she said they’d find somewhere.’

Daisy felt too sick at heart to be able to respond to this without dissolving into tears. Since she’d lost her own little son, she seemed to have turned into a proper cry baby but she’d so hoped to keep the little girls close by her, where they felt secure and happy, and she could keep an eye on them. ‘I’ll go to the town hall tomorrow and ask where they are so that I can at least visit.’

Daisy felt sorry for Mr Marshall. The poor man was only trying to do his best for his wife, after all. The last thing they all wanted was for her to lose the baby. And Daisy was so concerned for Mrs Marshall, as well as being worried about Megan and Trish going to yet another unknown billet, that she felt quite unable to sit in the living room and listen to the wireless as she usually did at the end of the day, let alone sit and knit balaclavas and listen to Mrs Chapman’s aimless chatter. She made the excuse of a headache, saying she wanted to go straight up to bed.

‘Do you want a Beecham’s powder, dear? Help yourself, you know where they are.’

‘I’ll be all right, thanks, nice as ninepence after a good night’s sleep.’ No, she wouldn’t, Daisy thought. She felt devastated by the loss of her two little friends, and desperate to think of some way to help them. She lay awake for hours, shedding quite a few tears into her pillow, struggling to find a solution until exhaustion finally claimed her.

Laura spent most of the following morning again searching the house for any sign of a marriage or birth certificate, or diary of some sort. She found a bundle of deeds for the house which kept her happily occupied for a good hour or more struggling to decipher the old handwriting, none of which added anything further to her stock of knowledge on Daisy. Could Daisy have deposited some of her private papers with a bank? It hardly seemed likely. Laura wondered if her father had any in his possession because, if so, there was little hope of persuading him to let her see them. He had most firmly put the past behind him, determined to blot his mother out of his life, and out of Laura’s too.

The implication that she’d been generous with her favours sat oddly with everything else she’d learned about her grandmother. Daisy didn’t at all seem to be the sort to go in for affairs.

Laura sat back on her heels and closed her eyes. There was a time when she might have said the same thing about herself, and yet last night. . . She put her fingers to her lips, recalling the tender moments of David’s kiss. The snow had melted with the morning sun, almost as if it were part of some magical fantasy, a strange mix of dream and nightmare. Felix storming about her kitchen while she calmly made chilli and then David doing his knight in shining armour bit. It had taken on a surreal quality. The meal together after Felix had roared off had been delightful, exciting and thoroughly illicit, and Laura had indeed wanted them to be snowed in so that he would stay and the good feeling could go on and on.

There was no denying that she’d ached for him to make love to her. And would it have led to an affair? Or simply a one night stand? Either way, it might have made it more difficult for her to gain a divorce, so she really ought to take care and show more sense. She was staying on here to build herself a new life, create a new independence and for that she needed income, which meant getting the guest house going. Soon. It would certainly not be conducive for clear thinking to fall into bed with the first good looking male who happened along.

Perhaps Daisy had fallen for someone in just the same way. Perhaps Daisy and Harry had married too quickly, because of the war, and discovered they weren’t suited quite so well as they’d imagined? Or he’d never come back at all.

‘Oh, but that would be so sad.’ Laura found that she’d spoken the words out loud. She wanted Daisy to marry her sweetheart and live happily ever after, have some time together at least.
 

Perhaps she’d fallen for Clem, as well as his house. Was that why he’d left it to her? No, far too mercenary. Yet if something had happened to Aunt Florrie, it might have left Daisy and Clem living dangerously intimate lives alone at Lane End Farm. But none of this seemed at all likely and so, in Laura’s opinion, her father’s condemnatory attitude towards his mother must be because of a foolish, youthful mistake, which anyone could make. What was it about men that drove them to cast the blame entirely on the woman when it quite plainly took two people to get into that sort of mess?
 

Laura still wondered if Daisy had some other dark secret, and, if so, how it could be discovered. If only walls really did have ears, and could speak as well, what a tale they would have to tell.
 

Looking in despair at the jumble of papers spread all over the rug, she tidied them hastily away and reached for the phone. Time to see old Mr Capstick. The best person to tell her about Daisy’s documents was Daisy’s old solicitor.

Something must have woken her. It was still pitch dark and although Daisy felt sick with exhaustion and lack of sleep, yet for some reason she was wide awake and could almost swear there was someone else in the room. But how could there be, unless Mrs Chapman had popped in to see how her headache was? But wasn’t that the sound of someone breathing, quite close by? And then she smelled the unmistakable scent of stale sweat and wool.

Daisy froze. Even before the covers were lifted and a heavy body slid into bed beside her, she knew who it was. She tried to move but an arm clamped itself tight around her, fat fingers starting to stroke her throat, moving slowly down to her breast. ‘Don’t fret little Daisy. I saw you were upset and I’ve come to give you a bit of a cuddle. Nothing like a cuddle to make a person feel better. You can cry on my shoulder, if you like.’

Daisy lay petrified, not knowing whether to scream and risk upsetting Mrs Chapman, hit out at him which could result in him turning violent and hitting her back, or suffer the soft pawing of his groping hand in silence. She opted for the latter in the hope an opportunity might present itself for her to make an escape. She wasn’t optimistic. The weight of his over-warm body against hers was suffocating. Daisy could hear the pounding of her heart in her ears, and her skin start to crawl as his hand lifted the hem of her night-gown, the stubby, ink stained fingers now walking up her leg as he chanted a little nursery rhyme in her ear.

‘Incy-wincy spider climbed the spout one day.’

She shot out of bed faster than a bullet from a gun, and flew to the door, fumbling with the handle in her frantic anxiety to get out, until finally she wrested it open and almost fell out of the room, a jabbering Mr Chapman hard on her tail.
 

‘It’s all right Daisy. It was only a little cuddle. Be a good girl, there’s a love, and don’t make a fuss. Mrs Chapman wouldn’t understand.’

‘Nor do I, you dirty old…!’

‘Daisy, please. Let me just explain...’

What it was he might have said, they were never to discover. As Mr Chapman came blundering out onto the landing, Mrs Chapman suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs in her long night-gown. Perhaps she’d come to check on Daisy’s headache, or else to see what all the noise was about. It was quite by accident, in the heat and rush of the moment, that the pair collided but for the rest of her life, Daisy would never forget the expression of total surprise on Mrs Chapman’s face as she tipped backwards down the stairs, arms and legs flailing like a rag doll, her last image on this earth that of her husband prancing about stark naked on the landing in front of her evacuee.

Laura found old Mr Capstick living in sheltered accommodation, not at all the doddering old man she’d expected but lively and alert or, as he said himself, ‘still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.’ He claimed to be one of the useless males of his generation who couldn’t cope once his wife had died. At a guess he was well into his eighties so she told him he deserved a little tender care and attention after a lifetime of hard work.

‘It’s certainly a treat to be visited by an attractive young woman. I’m sure there must be more to it than my ageing charms. What can I do for you, my dear?’

Laughing, Laura explained who she was and how interested she’d become in finding out more about Daisy. ‘Admittedly all due, in the first place, to an enormous sense of guilt. I neglected her rather, for reasons I won’t bore you with. Now I’m absolutely gripped, keen to learn anything I can about her. I was talking to your son, Nick, and he told me that it was through trying to locate Aunt Florrie that she came to Lane End in the first place. And apparently it’s Uncle Clem we should thank for the house, since he insisted on leaving it to her, and not to Florrie.'

‘Oh, yes indeed, that is very true. Clem wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m afraid he and his wife didn’t get on.’

This seemed to fit in uncomfortably well with her theory that Clem might have been Daisy’s lover, and Laura wondered how to phrase her next question but, blushing slightly, decided to risk it. ‘He wasn’t a blood uncle though, was he? You don’t think there was - well, anything between them, and that’s why he chose Daisy in place of his wife?’

Old Mr Capstick put back his head and let out a great belly laugh. The chuckle rumbled from deep inside his plump stomach and soon Laura was laughing too. It was hard not to, as she’d clearly said something highly amusing. He took off his spectacles to wipe tears of laughter from his eyes, gave them a good rub with his handkerchief before continuing, ‘Sorry to disappoint you, my dear, but nothing quite so melodramatic. Anyway, I doubt Clem would have had it in him. No, no, Florrie was a miserable soul and they didn’t have a particularly easy marriage. Nothing suited her and she moaned from dawn to dusk about absolutely everything. As we say in these parts, she was never happy unless she had something to complain about. Daisy, bless her generous heart, was the only one who could deal with the woman.’

Laura was intrigued and yet disappointed all at the same. She’d thought perhaps that this might be the answer, the secret that Daisy had kept to herself all these years. She was quite convinced that there must be another, besides the illegitimate child she bore, otherwise why call it a house of secrets? Plural! Why would her own son hate her with such a vehemence? Laura wasn’t convinced this was simply because of the baby. ‘Was Florrie unhappy because of the child she lost? Nick mentioned something about it. That was perhaps why Daisy got on so well with her, because she too had lost a child.’

Old Mr Capstick glanced at her quizzically, eyes narrowing into a little frown. ‘You know about that then, do you? About the child?’